Although he made his name as a realist painter, in recent years the British artist Clive Head has developed an approach to figurative painting in which images resist a single, stable reading. A form that initially appears to represent one thing may, through sustained looking, reveal itself as something quite different. Figures, objects and spatial relationships can shift in meaning as the viewer moves through the image perceptually, so that the experience of looking becomes active, unstable and extended through time.
In this talk, Head will discuss how these ideas have emerged within his own painting practice and how they relate to broader questions of representation, perception and pictorial structure. He will also consider historical and contemporary artists whose work employs comparable forms of transformation, ambiguity and visual doubleness, placing his own practice within a longer tradition of images that challenge the apparent certainty of what we see.
The talk will offer an opportunity to hear directly from one of Britain’s leading figurative painters about the intellectual and visual ideas that underpin his work, and about the possibilities of metamorphic form as a way of rethinking how images are constructed and experienced.
